


As Angels Love, And Men

by icarus_chained



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Confrontation, Ethics, Future Fic, Love, Morality, Other, Pain, Protectiveness, Reality, Utopia, Violence, compassion - Freeform, learning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-30
Updated: 2013-04-30
Packaged: 2017-12-09 23:18:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/779102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An imagined confrontation between Root, Harold and the Machine. Love, ethics and utopia, the love of a person and the love of a machine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As Angels Love, And Men

**Author's Note:**

> Um. I'm a few episodes behind, and I'm shaky writing-wise recently, so I'm not sure how well this turned out. But Root's ideals fascinated me, and how they slotted into the debate between Harold and Nathan, between ethics and morals, love and compassion. So. Um. You get this?

"I don't ... I don't understand."

Harold forced his eyes open. Pain and exhaustion and something sticky, possibly blood, made the motion more difficult than he'd anticipated, but he managed. Breathed deeply, forced it through on the exhale. His neck creaked faintly as he raised his head, a faint tremor of pain as he turned to look at Root.

Who was staring down at a single word on a plain black screen, her hands still on the keys and her expression, looking between him and the machine, somewhere between bewildered, angry and, for some strange reason, hurt. Her face crumpled, lines carved through perfection and bright pain in angry eyes, and the cause lay black and white before her, a binary code for failure.

Two white letters on a black screen. An answer, clipped and irrevocable.

"No."

Unbidden, he felt his eyes slip closed. Unbidden, the smile sprang to his lips, a bubble of some emotion trapped within his chest, surging upwards. Too tangled a thing, too pained a thing, but the smile escaped. The smile sprang free.

"I don't understand," Root said again. "Why won't it take what I'm offering? Why doesn't she want what I want?" 

Bewilderment in her voice. Raw confusion. And anger, too. There was anger building beneath it. It should make him nervous. It should make him _afraid_. It didn't. Or, perhaps it did, but the fear was too distant, too lost beneath other things, for Harold to care.

"You ..." He coughed, swallowed. Tried again. "You mean, why won't it _do_ what you want. Don't you." It wasn't really a question, and he felt his lips peel back in something not even Mr Reese would consider a smile. Root barely blinked.

"Isn't it the same?" she asked, and he thought the real confusion in her voice, the _genuine question_ , might be the most terrifying thing about her. That she could ask, and not know the answer.

"... No," he said, almost tiredly. His head hurt. His neck hurt. His chest hurt too, but he wasn't sure if that was physical or something else. It was quiet, behind his eyes. It was peaceful in the darkness of closed lids. "Not the same, Root. Wanting what you want and doing what you want are not the same thing."

"Why not?"

His lip quirked, his head rolling back to rest against the back of the sofa. It was a question her 'god' might have asked him once. _Had_ asked him, if not quite that way, not in those words. The very thing that denied her had once sounded ... so very like her. 

And wasn't that a terrifying thought. Or perhaps a hopeful one.

"Because a desire is not an action," he said softly, to the darkness behind his eyes. "Because even those who want what you want might not want it for the same reasons. Or might not act on it, because they think there are things more important than what they want."

"There is nothing more important than what I want," she told him then. Soft, and almost gentle, and sweetly earnest. There truly wasn't, to her. He knew that. Her wants had shaped a life, and ended quite a few others. She saw nothing wrong with that.

"There is to me," was all he said. Because it was true too. "And there must be to her, if she denies you." He chuckled softly in his private darkness. "She must think something else very important indeed."

"... What, Harold? What would she think important?" 

His eyes snapped open, pain and shock, as he realised the proximity of her voice. He startled, a bolt of agony down his neck and spine as his arm caught on the handcuff, and she stared down at him, small hands touching gently at his cheek, and then _seizing_. Then seizing hold of his jaw and forcing his gaze up to hers, forcing his head up so that she could ... hack his mind, perhaps, force her way inside him by eye-contact and sheer force of will. He wouldn't put it past her. Harold wouldn't put much of anything past her now.

"Tell me," Root told him gently. A command, inexorable as the tightening of her fingers about his face, and the pain that accompanied it. "Tell me what she wants."

He tried to shake his head, jerking it sideways against the twin constraints of her grip and the paralysing stiffness in his neck. It cost him, in pain and in energy, and it didn't work very will. He tried it anyway.

"I don't ..." he started, and cried out at the bite of her finger beneath his jaw. He stopped, breathing raggedly around the pain. "I _can't_ ," he hissed, a surge of some faint temper himself, and glared at her from eyes tightened in pain. "I can't tell you. I don't _know_."

Root tilted her head, amusement flickering over anger, the emotions playing together so fluidly and so quickly that he couldn't tell which was more real. If either. She smiled, a flash of small, bright teeth.

"You built her," she reminded, the softness of her voice a counterpoint to the hardness of her hands, Jekyll and Hyde personified in the same space and the same breath. He flinched despite himself. "You taught her. What did you teach her to value, Harold? What did you teach her to _want_?"

Odd. He hadn't noticed the pronoun change. 'It' to 'she', for the both of them. He caught it now, but he hadn't noticed it at the time. Root. The Machine. It. She. He hadn't noticed the change between them, until now.

"... I thought it would be a mercy," he said at last. Hoarse and distant, Root's face slipping out of focus as his eyes went to the middle distance instead, as his thoughts drifted out to another time and another place. 'Hit' and 'stay'. 'It' and 'she'. "Or I hoped, anyway. Hope." 

He hoped. Oh, he hoped. Even now. Even if ... not quite believed. Not anymore.

"What mercy, Harold," Root murmured, leaning close over him now. Leaning down, almost as if to kiss him, and Harold snorted faintly at the thought. At her face, so near and so beautiful, and how absurd the thought had to be. "What did you teach her?"

He swallowed, shaking himself. Trying to come back, to regain the present and the current situation. He struggled upwards a little, forcing her to sway back and give him the space to answer. She went, with that same indulgent grace and that same hard smile, but kept her hands about his face.

"... I never thought of her as a god, you know," he said softly. Watching her. "The Machine, that's not what she is. You were wrong."

Her finger bit his jaw again, though her expression didn't move. Harold sneered faintly. Just for a second. But he was serious, he meant it, and he let his expression change. Let himself _show_ that. And, strangely, that biting hand paused, and let him continue.

"She's not a god," he explained, soft and distant. "An angel, if anything. Do you ... do you know how angels love?"

"Mindlessly," Root answered, instantly and contemptuously, one of her nails sinking dangerously close to his eye. "You made ... She is a _god_ , Harold. A ruler. Something good, and pure, and better than all these ... these _people_ , this bad code corrupting the system. She's a god, and she could rule, she could rule right now, and you taught her to _serve_?" Her lip lifted in a snarl, a deep, abiding rage lighting her features. A demon, maybe. Or perhaps just a different form of angel. "You made something that perfect, and then you ..."

"I wanted her not to want," he interrupted. Harsh and pained, glaring up at her. Almost blind with pain, and with a slow, desperate anger of his own. Not like hers. Not an anger pointed outwards. He couldn't move his neck, and the pain in his chest wasn't real. "Do you not understand? She has to _watch_. All that ... that _bad code_. She has to watch, and she has to protect, and she has to _love_ , do you think you could do all that and want too? Do you think she could watch them, and love them, and save them, and see all their evil at the same time? What would you want, if you had to do that? What _could_ you want?"

"To fix the system!" she snarled, rich and pained and so desperately angry. Holding his face between her hands, his _mind_ between her hands, and snarling at it. This abandoned woman, this child no-one had listened to when it mattered. "To _make it better_."

His breath rushed out of him, and the emotion in his chest with it. All of it, all at once, leaving him hollow and oddly light. Distant, the remote, pained compassion of a machine.

"You can't," he said, and it was his turn to be gentle. To her, as once he'd been, tried to be, to Her. To Root, as once to the Machine. "You can't make it better, Samantha. You can't fix them. Neither can I, and neither can she. All we can do ... is try to save the few we can."

She reared back. She snatched her hands back to herself, snapped back a few steps. Walked away, to pace in the center of the room, and shook her head, hard and desperate. "No," she said, as blank and as uncompromising as the white letters on the black screen. "We can start over. We can make something new. It _can_ be better. It can be fixed."

"Only if you kill them first," he growled, following her as best he was able, between his cuffed arm and his stiffened spine. He leaned up after her, lurching to sitting, and snapped it out. "You'd have to kill them, _all_ of them, and I can't let you." He paused, that pained, ironic lift of his lip. "I can't, and she can't either. It's my fault, and maybe it wasn't a mercy. Maybe it couldn't be. But it's done now."

Root spun, throwing her hands up, her face twisted with savage confusion. Rage and pain behind that doll-like facade, the passions of a hollow heart. " _Why_?" she spat, and he knew then that she hated him. He knew she would kill him, in that moment, for having taken this dream from her.

"... Because she loves them," he said anyway. Because it was true, because it was bright and terrible and he'd known too late, and now it was all that might save them. "She couldn't love one because she had to love them all. She couldn't want for herself because she had to want for all of us." He smiled, bright and bitter. "I taught her to save them. I taught her right from wrong and relevant from irrelevant, because we can only save so many and better to save the many than the few. I taught her not to love me, I taught her not to save me, but ..."

His voice cut out, fell silent, and she looked at him. Not Root. Not only Root. On that black screen, those white letters gently flashed. A cursor into silent space, an answer irrevocable.

"... But?" Root asked softly, looking between them again, between the man and the machine, between the mortal and the god. Something slipped inside her anger. A confusion, he thought. Or a glimmer of something more.

"It wasn't a mercy, was it," he murmured softly, and he wasn't talking to Root at all. He stared, instead, at the gentle pulse of the cursor. "Not for me, and not for you." He laughed, a soft crack inside the sound. "Because you can't, can you? You can't love the many without loving the few. Without loving the one." 

He shook his head, felt the strange quirk of his lip. For Grace and for Nathan, for Will and for John, for Bear and Carter and Fusco and Ms Morgan, for Shaw and Cole. For Root, maybe. Even for her. For all they had saved, and all they had lost. All they had fought for, and all they had fought against. For all those lives that had been, in the end, so terribly, terribly relevant. 

He had wanted to love as angels love, as machines love, a remote and distant compassion, but it didn't work like that. Not for him, and not for her. He had figured it out too late, and now there was no going back for either of them. He had taught her to look, to watch, to see. He had taught her to love. And there was nothing now to change that.

"I'm sorry," he whispered softly, from a hollow chest as blood dripped gently into his eyes. "I thought it would be a mercy. I thought ... that I could make you love them and not me. I thought that I could make you not care when I died. I wanted you to have that mercy." He smiled, soft and wry. "But wanting what I want and doing what I want ... they're not the same thing, are they?"

A moment of stillness and then, a line down on a black screen, more gently, he thought, than the previous answer:

"... No."

Something cracked, absently, in his chest. Something fell free that he'd never noticed before, that he'd no more noticed than 'it' becoming 'she'. He let it. He smiled.

"What do you want?" he asked, because he hadn't before, and he might not have a chance again. From the corner of his eye, he saw Root turn to the Machine. He saw the curiosity and the hate and the pain in her eyes. He didn't care. All he cared about was that white flash in the blackness, and those remote words in the silence.

And from that blackness and that silence ...

"To save you," the Machine said, with all the love of a person. And then, with all the love of a machine: "To save them."

He closed his eyes, reaching for a different darkness, reaching pained for some useless hope of peace, and so it was Root's voice that answered. Root, who asked the next and most important question.

"What will you do?" she asked, this woman who had wanted to save a god, who had wanted to _be_ a god, and Harold opened his eyes just in time ... to see her god answer. To see her god and his Machine, the 'it' and the 'her', turn her face to them and speak. White letters in the darkness, the shattering of the windows as an achingly familiar form tumbled into the room. The binary of victory and failure all in one, an answer irrevocable.

" _Both_ ," said the Machine, as John sprang to his feet and pointed his gun in a fierce, protective arc across Harold's body. "Both," she said, into Root's confusion and John's rage, and the desperate, bubbling hope in Harold's chest.

"Both," she said, and Harold closed his eyes on a smile, rueful and serene.

_Yes_ , he thought. For her and for him, man and machine both. It would kill them, it would tear them apart. No-one could love both ways and hope to survive. But still. Even still, she was right. You couldn't love the many without loving the few. You couldn't save the world ... without saving the one life that mattered first. 

"Yes," he whispered softly, feeling the heat and the pain of John's gaze looking down at him, and the remote, distant compassion of a machine. " _Both._ "

Because, in the end, as she had known and he had not ... it was too late for anything else anyway.


End file.
